Expat Cinema : Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy VO st EN

Hamaguchi uses irony as the key to understanding the sources of social inhibitions: the tension resulting from the presence of other people and their ability to evaluate the hero’s actions. In short, alienation, loneliness resulting from culture’s dictations, commandments and limitations.
Eye For Film

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, in its masterfully unassuming simplicity, embodies that quality of Eric Rohmer’s films in which characters certain of themselves are gradually taken aback by human interactions. As often happens in life, in these movies being with other people has the power to crack the façade of individual certainty—of identity, of morality, of the very workings of the world—and force a reckoning of character and being.
MUBI

This trio of stories is elegant and amusing, with a delicacy of touch and real imaginative warmth. The narratives saunter along lightly but fundamentally seriously, asking us to consider how the paths we take in life – the wrong turnings, the right turnings – can be governed by the merest chance. It’s a really pleasurable and invigorating experience.
The Guardian